Some readers may be thrown a little by the title of Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (Spiegel & Grau, 304 pp., ***½ stars).

But when The Daily Show host explains what it means, an alternate universe — at once distant and yet uncomfortably close to home — opens up before your eyes: A world where the absurdity of race is institutionalized into authoritarian rule.

For Noah was born 32 years ago in a South Africa under the rigidly, often brutally enforced system of apartheid, the son of a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother. As Noah writes, “In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent…Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke…race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.”

And so, Noah continues, “Where most children are proof of their parents' love, I was the proof of their criminality.”

Apartheid was by then in its waning days and would be voted away in 1994. But as Noah came of age in Soweto as a light-skinned mixed-race person, he still had to negotiate his way through nettlesome, often cruelly patrolled barriers of caste and color. “You were what the government said you were,” Noah writes.

There was even a test conducted by the government for those who were applying for “white” status in which a pencil went into your hair. “If it fell out, you were white. If it stayed on, you were colored.”

If this sounds absurd at best, barbaric at worst, consider that such distinctions determined where one was allowed to live, with whom one was allowed to work or socialize and how much money you could make.

Matters weren’t much better after apartheid ended when Noah was 10. With black people now in charge, Noah was still considered more “colored” than “black.” “You could imagine,” he writes, “how weird it was for me” to be “mixed, but not colored — colored by complexion, but not by culture.”

Trevor Noah on the set of 'The Daily Show with Trevor Noah' in New York.(Photo: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

It is hard to imagine. But what makes Born a Crime such a soul-nourishing pleasure, even with all its darker edges and perilous turns, is reading Noah recount in brisk, warmly conversational prose how he learned to negotiate his way through the bullying and ostracism from darker-skinned children in his township, making his outsider status work for him among the jocks, nerds and party people.

The mental agility Noah displays in his social transactions, whether in being able to converse with different tribes in their own language or hustle bootleg compact discs as an older teen in at-risk neighborhoods, makes it easy to understand how he became a quick-witted, sophisticated stand-up comic and talk-show host.

What also helped was having a mother like Patricia Nombuyiselo Noah, who in many ways is Born a Crime’s most heroic figure. While Noah’s white father Robert was a distant, though still caring figure in his life, his mother administered “old-school, Old Testament discipline,” broadening his horizons while also compelling him to understand the world’s harsher aspects.

In a shocking turn of events, Noah, who moved to the USA last year, has a chance to repay his enormous debt to her tough love. Consider Born a Crime another such gift to her — and an enormous gift to the rest of us.